Inner worlds

When you always run the risk of your next step being straight off a cliff and into the valley of darkest hopeless despair without any warning, you tend to tread lightly. Or as lightly as you can plan.

Half of why the unpredictability of life, the universe, and everything makes me so gosh darn depressed, is because of this problem. Now everyone feels this to a degree. You don't know when someone is gonna be rude to you over the phone, and spoil your day. I internalise this to a horrifying degree though.

For example. Yesterday was a relatively good day. Until I had to give my mother some bad news, and she freaked out taking out all the big insult slinging guns and letting them all go off against me, seeing as she can't hit her real target. She did not just shoot the messenger, she cremated her (me) and I am sure she felt such a relief to get a load of stress of her shoulders at the same time. What better way to de-stress than to take all your crap and load it off on someone else.

Me? I started off calmly understanding that I should not take it personally, and as it escalated, my boundaries started wobbling a bit, then shaking, and finally crumbled, and I took in all of that shit, absorbed it, and whoops back down deep. Hello Valley surfing here we go.

The viscous circle then continues, because now I am walking around on very thin emotional ice, the cracks are actually showing through and I have a whole day of 6 year old acrobatics to still get through, without breaking through that ice.

Where a moment before I had been filled with enough buffer power to be able to function and weather some small storms, it had now been ripped away and I was way over into the red end of this mood spectrum.

I think I managed okay, but I'm on the depressed side again which is so miserably horrible I don't even want to refer to it.

I actually sit here all day every day, in this mind of mine and think of all the things I could and can do that would make me feel better. I even try to do them. Even the ones I don't like to do, or don't have energy for. I actively try to do things that will help me feel more positive. When it doesn't work anymore. That is when it gets scary.

What is most upsetting though is when all that hard worl gets blown away by one person's inconsiderate selfishness. And in one split second all is lost. If I could undo that? If I could stop that from happening. I would be way better able to deal with what my brain and life throws me.

Boundaries

I don't have very strong ones.

For a long time I had no idea of what boundaries really are. I think if you know me, especially online and have read here, you know my boundaries are very soft.

Wikipedia explains them as follows:

Personal boundaries are guidelines, rules or limits that a person creates to identify for him- or herself what are reasonable, safe and permissible ways for other people to behave around him or her and how he or she will respond when someone steps outside those limits.^[1] They are built out of a mix of beliefs, opinions, attitudes, past experiences and social learning.^[2]Personal boundaries define you as an individual, outlining your likes and dislikes, and setting the distances you allow others to approach.^[3] They include physical, mental, psychological and spiritual boundaries, involving beliefs, emotions, intuitions and self-esteem.^[4] Jacques Lacan considered them to be layered in a hierarchy, reflecting “all the successive envelopes of the biological and social status of the person”^[5] from the most primitive to the most advanced.

 After my little breakdown this week and a chat with my psychologist yesterday it once again came to my attention that my boundaries need some enforcing.

I had to deal with a difficult client, who refused to pay me, even though I did absolutely nothing wrong, followed every letter of the law, and tried my best to prepare them for a large bill.

I took it extremely badly and ended up feeling worthless, desolate, and hopeless. For the first time in a very long while I had suicidal thoughts, I felt absolutely useless. I only realised yesterday in therapy that there is absolutely no correlation between a client projecting their own crap onto me, and my abilities.

That's very blurry to me. I take any kind of rejection extremely personally, and half my emotional blocks have been because of that. I hurt so easily.

So now to figure out where it comes from and how to repair my crappy sense of self. No self esteem is so unattractive, and yet I can recognise and discuss it intellectually and still fail to apply it.

I don't have many psych visits left that the medical aid will pay for, and there is no way I can afford any more visits on my own, so I am very scared that I'm going to just revert to old behaviour and thoughts when I don't get my weekly dose of reason. My psychologist is very honest and I have learnt to trust him, even though that's hard for me, and I still hold back sometimes. It feels like we are making progress.

I don't like to see the hurt and pathetic little lost child part of me, but recognising and fixing that is what will bring the healing in all aspects of my life.